Welcome to the very first edition of Web3 for Marketers.

My goal when I set out to bring this idea to life was simple: I want to make it as easy as possible for you to succeed in the web3 world as a marketer—whether you’re a marketer by occupation or the marketer in your own business.

This week, we’ve seen a lot of chatter about changes happening in Instagram-land. We’ve seen Meta (formerly Facebook) post their first ever year-on-year revenue decline. And, in my conversations with business owners and creators, I’ve seen them getting more and more frustrated at how challenging it is to get their content—great content—in front of the right eyeballs.

At the same time, $430 million was invested into web3 companies last week alone. That's a biiig signal by any standards.

1. Community is the new social media

And no, I don't mean Facebook Groups. Nobody needs more of those.

Although still in its early days, the web3 world has already made one thing clear: Influence is not about how many followers you have, but rather the strength of your community. And this article from the Washington Post suggests that marketing is starting to trend this way in general, with influencers focusing more on community-based platforms (like Discord and Telegram).

What this means for you: Even if your brand hasn’t dipped a toe into web3 yet, there’s still value in building a community that’s not at the whim of algorithms. As we see further shifts in social media and greater adoption of web3, community will only play a more important role in your marketing strategy.

2. What’s in your wallet?

Mine is a mess.

In my wallet, you'll find coins in four different currencies, my driver’s licence, three expired debit cards, faded receipts and a ton of loyalty cards I'll never use. All things that tell you a lot about me—my name and age, some of my recent purchases, what stores I’m loyal to, and how disorganised I am.

Your web3 wallet is similar to a physical wallet. Yes, it houses your cryptocurrencies, but it’s also where you can store your NFTs—things like your virtual loyalty cards, memberships, digital art and more. In the future, we’ll likely see your wallet hold all the content you’ve created too, rather than gifting your IP to a third-party platform like Instagram every time you post something.

Your wallet carries your identity. It has the potential to become like a social media profile, curated to tell the world what brands you support, what content you create, what communities you’re part of and what kind of art you enjoy.

And last week, we saw some big announcements that support the idea of your wallet as your identity…

Up until now, there hasn’t been any way for one wallet-holder to communicate with another wallet-holder (other than by sending tokens). While it’s still early days—and I won’t be rushing to adopt it just yet—this new feature from WalletConnect signals that our wallets will be the way we interact with others in the web3 world and hints at what the future of DMs might be.

Mirror.xyz (web3’s answer to Medium) announced they would allow readers to subscribe to any publication using their wallets, suggesting that the future of email marketing might be communicating directly to our subscribers' wallets rather than their email addresses.

What this means for you: It’s too early to tell how this will play out practically, but a worthwhile exercise would be understanding, what identity or persona does my ideal customer share with the world, based on what they hold in their wallet?

3. It's not about the NFT

While NFTs surged in popularity in 2021, most of the people buying into them were speculating that they’d go up in value—they were doing it purely for financial gain. The news headlines about multi-million dollar NFT sales naturally led many to believe they were a fad, rather than appreciating what the underlying technology could be used for.

Now, we’ve seen the pendulum swing the other way, with some major brands refusing to mention the word “NFT” during NFT launches, possibly to avoid the negative perception many have of the word.

What this means for you: It was never about the NFT. What is the real underlying value? What are you really selling? If your brand is experimenting with NFTs (or plans to), focus on why it will help you to better serve your community and your customers rather than selling an NFT for NFT's sake.

If you've made it all the way down here, that means either you found this interesting, or you're on your way to the unsubscribe button at the bottom.

Either way, I'd love it if you could please take 2 minutes to let me know how I'm doing. What would you like to see more of? Less of?

Until next week,

Steph

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This should go without saying, but I am a marketer, not a financial advisor. The content in this email is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as financial advice. Please take care and do your own research before investing in any web3 projects.